The post 5 sectors which will see impactful RFID disruption in 2017 appeared first on Dolphin RFID.
]]>Aviation:
International Air Transport Association (IATA) has mandated that by 2018, airlines must track each pieces of baggage that comes in at check-in and goes out at arrival. It means that airlines will need to analyse their existing monitoring systems, and implement appropriate technology which can do this in a fool-proof manner while saving on cost and time. Delta Airlines, one of America’s top airlines, has invested over $50million in RFID for baggage tracking and management. Delta Airlines have realized that RFID signals can be picked by receivers 99.85% of times as compared to a 90% success rate of manual scanners. And, the difference of 8% could be the cause that leads to loss or delay of more than 20 million baggage pieces. RFID in baggage tracking will lead to a considerable reduction in lost baggage by 2024 and will enable the air transport industry to save over $3 billion within the next seven years. In addition, airline operators, maintenance and repair organizations (MROs) and manufacturers across the supply chain will rely on RFID to streamline the pace of operations, and ensure fastest possible turnaround for passenger as well as cargo flights.
The scope of RFID in aviation is immense. At Dolphin, we are privy to this global interest and are feeling the pulse in the form of requests from our foreign partners for helping airlines in the respective countries to implement RFID systems to gain a clear business advantage. In India, we are in talks with multiple airlines to help them to adhere to the IATA guidelines and be operationally superior by implementing RFID technologies.
Retail:
In 2016, 4.6 billion clothing items carried RFID tags. However, this does not represent even 10% of the total apparel market, thus the potential for growth in retail and apparel is immense.
In a survey of 60 retailers with revenues of $500 million and above undertaken by Kurt Salmon, 73 percent have said that they are either deploying or are doing a pilot on RFID technologies. That number is more than double the 34 percent for the same study done in 2014.
Retail majors such as Marks & Spencer and Decathlon have had major RFID implementation in 2016. Even RFID tag providers Avery Dennison, Impinj and NXP have all reported a strong growth in tag sales. Avery Dennison has had nearly 30 percent growth in 2016 despite a slow apparel market in the US.
The other micro-segments that fall in the broad retail ambit such as cosmetics, electronics, auto ancillary, sports goods, jewellery and small home appliances are all seeing RFID tagging and tracking. The retail space, it’s entire supply chain, right to the warehouses, are all potential areas for robust RFID implementations. The ever-burgeoning retail market and retailers are seeing the benefits of RFID hence we would see a huge fillip in this space for RFID technologies in 2017. RFID is a must in the emerging Omni Channel sales which is the way forward for Retail.
IT & ITeS:
The IT services opportunity is huge world over. There are many mid-tier to small-tier IT companies in India which employ thousands of people. The laptops, desktops, dongles and mobiles assigned to people are the assets that organizations would want to tag, track and protect.
IT companies are now broadening the perimeter of operations. Important business data can be accessed by employees from home and on their mobiles with policies such as “Bring Your Own Device” (BYOD) becoming increasingly prevalent. These companies often work with critical data from the clients; hence their server and data centers need to be safeguarded from unauthorised access. RFID systems allow seamless entry and exit of company’s assets and restrict unauthorised access to key servers and data centers.
In a huge IT and ITeS organization, there could be over 100,000 assets. Research shows that if RFID is deployed to track these assets, the annual labour cost savings would exceed $150,000. This cost saving carries forward to subsequent years and goes on forever. Hence, RFID investments lead to significant returns and value over time.
RFID systems also enable to arrest any corrupt practices at entry and exit points and safeguard from tampering of technology assets. There is utmost transparency and accountability at all times as RFID systems can track and monitor all assets within seconds. This particularly helps IT companies that have set up huge development centers in SEZs, hence they are prone to sudden inspections and compliance checks. Companies such as Verizon already track their IT assets worldwide using RFID technology.
Healthcare:
Healthcare is among the fastest RFID adopters globally. The benefit of implementing RFID in hospitals is immense as it enables hospitals to focus on a greater cause – treating patients well and saving lives in a cost-effective manner.
Asset tracking and management in hospitals benefit immensely by use of RFID. About 20% of a hospital’s mobile assets (on average) are lost or stolen during their useful lifetime. The average cost works out to more than USD 3000 per item. Also, 75% of the time for maintenance is spent searching equipment. Hospitals typically over-stack up to 40% of spare inventory to mitigate the risk of running short of equipment during emergency. RFID can solve all these problems and ensure significant savings for hospitals without adversely impacting patient care. The savings can eventually be passed on to the patients to enable more people to afford better treatment.
Another area where RFID significantly benefits hospitals is in patient tracking and management, wherein a smart RFID device accessible by a mobile interface helps doctors and nurses to ensure perfect administration of medicines to patients at the right time. The hospitals are also able to track and manage documents and files of patients better and thus, ensuring seamless and effective treatment. Several hospitals all over the world have embraced RFID. Progressive hospitals in India such as the Apollo group of hospitals, and the Tata medical centre have been pioneers in leveraging RFID. The power of RFID in improving healthcare is such that even progressive Muncipal Corporations like the BMC are looking at introducing RFID based Asset Management in their hospitals.
Hospitality:
There is a latent demand for safe and secure hotel accommodation all over the world. The fact that start-ups like Airbnb are gaining serious momentum is testimony to this. With pilgrimage, medical tourism and leisure travel on the rise, safe, secure and reputed players in hospitality would be in great demand.
For the budget hotels to survive and compete with international counterparts and tackle disruptors in the space like Airbnb, leveraging RFID has become the need of the hour. With smart RFID based locks and energy systems, the customers are assured that their belongings are safe in hotel rooms hence enhancing the perception of safety. This leads to more people opting to stay at budget hotels that offer great service and helps the sector to flourish. The linked energy management systems also enable hotels to bring down their electricity costs. The “audit trail capture” feature of these locks helps to keep a check on any illegal use of rooms for nefarious activities and subsequent loss of both brand image and revenue. With the use of RFID readers, tracking and management of hotel’s assets can be done seamlessly and any unwarranted loss of assets can be kept in check. Hotels, after implementing RFID technologies, have seen a reduction in the inventory shrinkage from a 10% to 66% of the common shrinkage which leads to considerable savings in cost, enhances service efficiency and improves the bottom line.
Dolphin has introduced smart, RFID powered and energy efficient locks namely Aster, Sleek and Vidala that enables the budget hotels to offer the same sense of safety and security as luxury hotels at half the cost. The demand for these locks among the luxury properties is also catching up with hotel chains opting for Dolphin’s RFID powered locks and security systems. By assembling and marketing these locks and energy systems in India, Dolphin is giving a serious boost to our honourable Prime Minister Shri. Narendra Modi’s “Make in India” initiative.
Why Dolphin?
Dolphin RFID is one of the leading RFID service providers in the world with over 14 copyrights, 3 patents, and its own proprietary JAVA based middleware that can integrate with any core system irrespective of the sector or industry. With a network spanning 6 continents and a clientele comprising Forbes top 20 companies, Dolphin has been creating disruptive innovations, which has helped large organization and SMEs alike.
While Dolphin is on track to be a world leader in end to end RFID solutions, our larger mission is to empower all industries, especially across these five sectors, to leverage RFID and create disruptive business models for the larger good.
I hope all companies, be it large corporations or SMEs, embrace RFID in 2017 and give their businesses a better chance to succeed and prosper.
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]]>The post Seamlessness and Efficiency like never before appeared first on Dolphin RFID.
]]>RFID scores over manual systems
Even the most meticulous manual system will fail with such large volume of assets to be managed and hence the arising permutations and combinations. An RFID system enables the company to place a small tag on each asset. This tag can be read at the room/ floor level by room readers and also at the entry and exit points. In fact, at the entry/ exit points, it can be matched with the employee’s details (batch tags, ID card data etc.) and it can immediately throw up a discrepancy in data and disallow the asset to enter/leave the premise. It leads to safeguarding the assets and almost a 100% efficiency and accuracy in tracking and management of assets.
So, how does it work?
The RFID system is simple to understand and easier to use. Each asset’s RFID tag stores all relevant details about the asset. This includes the employee that the asset is assigned to, its manufacturer, its due date of maintenance etc.
The RFID reader can read the asset and check for any anomaly with respect to the asset. The monitoring is constantly on and real-time notifications are issued to the employee using the asset, the manager etc. through SMS.
RFID asset tracking tags can thus seamlessly replace sticky notes used for IT asset tracking. Instead, it can enable to track these assets in real-time for visibility, thus efficiently utilizing the “spend” on IT for better purposes.
It doesn’t stop there. Huge IT and ITeS companies are using RFID to tag critical data storage assets such as servers, storage devices that store sensitive data and also laptops and desktops. They use RFID to also store and safeguard each customer’s data thereby ensuring that they do not breach any compliance or allow unauthorized access to business critical data.
Data Center Asset Tracking, Maintenance and Management
With businesses becoming increasingly “digital” and Big Data laying the foundation for important initiatives such as Analytics, data has become a critical part of our existence. The need to store this data and to manage it efficiently has assumed significant importance. Over 2.5 Quintillion bytes of data (i.e. 2,500,000,000,000,000,000 bytes) is generated every single day. “Cloud” surely has become a buzzword and a lot of applications and underlying infrastructure is moving to the cloud. However, there are still a lot of critical applications and their underlying infrastructure that needs to be hosted in-house, either due to security concerns or owing to regulatory mandates.
More than 90% of the generated data in “unstructured” which means it is not recorded in tables in an orderly manner. This data could be tweets, emails, videos, photos, customer’s purchase logs and even call logs.
Thus, huge IT companies with dedicated business process outsourcing units or global firms establishing their back office in India have huge data centers. It’s a struggle to understand where the data is stored – which rack and row and in which data center. Any amount of meticulous manual recording would still always leave some room for unintentional errors. Such mistakes could, however, lead to loss of an asset (which can cost a lot of money) and more importantly, data which could prove fatal to business.
Will Manual tracking systems work?
There are a lot of companies which have tried to deploy the most orderly manual systems. The manual inventory process can be extremely slow to architect, create and deploy. Moreover, it utilizes time and energy of skilled engineers – which by itself is a currency for any IT or ITeS company. The manually tracked data centers also require highly skilled manpower to be recruited to understand the sensitivities of managing data and operating datacenters.
RFID enabled systems
Move to RFID enabled systems. With a tag on each asset and a reader that can track and monitor the asset, RFID changes the whole scenario, makes it simple and helps companies enhance the life of their assets. It also enables such companies to save millions of dollars, otherwise spent on tracking, maintenance and replacement of lost/misplaced IT assets.
Centralized Tracking and monitoring of assets
With RFID systems at its core, tracking and monitoring across delivery centres and data centres all over the world can be done by an IT company from a single centralized location.
Using such systems enables the following:
Real time inventory tracking
Real time notifications
In-depth analysis:
The system enables the centralized monitoring system to track and filter asset information as per customer, type of asset, location of site, asset ID, manufacturers name etc. This leads to a wealth of drill-down knowledge on asset and provides valuable insights into the purchase decisions.
Customized reports:
The centralized monitoring system can also create customized reports and alerts about their IT assets all over the world. This is invaluable for IT and ITeS companies as it enables them to avert mishaps save costs and prepare for the future with data driven insights on performance and management of IT assets.
One of the fastest growing IT companies, with its BPO arm, were among the early stage implementers of RFID and the results they derived from the implementation was staggering:
RFID installations have also enabled ITeS companies such as BPOs and call centres to only allow authorized vehicles into its premises. The information about such vehicles is stored at the system and the RFID reader in the gates can quickly check and help decide if the vehicle can be allowed in.
The IT and ITeS industry (even after having done the above and after having reaped its benefits) has still not scratched the tip of the “RFID opportunity” iceberg. With IoT, Digital, Big Data and Analytics, and Cloud technologies becoming increasingly prominent, RFID in IT is set to grow leaps and bounds.
Dolphin RFID is among the world leaders in end-to-end RFID solutions and capabilities. With our own proprietary JAVA based middleware, we undertake the entire RFID implementation lifecycle – consulting, implementation and post-implementation support and maintenance- for our customers.
Doesn’t the future of IT and ITeS look sparkling with an RFID backbone? If you believe in this future and would like to deliberate on it, I am just an email away at [email protected]
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]]>The post RFID and Digital India appeared first on Dolphin RFID.
]]>While Digital India is a great beginning, I believe that RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) will play a vital role in successful implementation of the Digital India dream. RFID is the cornerstone of a digital initiative.
With RFID, identification of assets – both material and human – becomes cost-effective and easy. It further enables easy identification, information management etc. of goods and products that are transported across the supply chain thus bringing increased efficiency and effectiveness in our lives. I would like to illustrate this with a few examples.
The Digital Parking System
The digital parking systems of the future will leverage RFID to enable communication between the parking lot and the vehicle owners. The RFID tag on the car ( now made compulsory by the Govt.) will communicate with the sensors in the parking lot to enable the car owners/ drivers to enter the parking lot and easily find available parking space indicated by LED’s controlled by ultrasonic sensors in the parking slots. Using a mobile application, the drivers can not only check for available space but also reserve the parking slot for themselves. This saves time and enhances efficiency for managing parking lots. It also enables the administration of the parking lot of malls, multiplexes etc. to have a clear data on the demand-supply equation and accordingly decide on differential pricing. This will enable them to earn better for the space offered. As the cities are always congested, vehicle owners can always check the nearby parking spaces, the cost at which it is offered etc. and reserve an appropriate parking slot.
Smart Village
One of the major initiatives of the Modi Govt is to create Smart Village to ensure that benefits of digitisation are available to the majority of Indians who reside in our villages. A combined use of the Adhaar Card and RFID technologies can enable positive identification of an individual. This will be the first step towards ensuring that the services meant for the poor are actually received by them and is not pilfered by the middle man. It will thus ensure last mile reach of the Government’s services as well as the benefits and subsidies it intends to offer the rural population.
Public Distribution System
Public distribution system (PDS) is a joint initiative by the Indian state and central government to distribute essential commodities such as wheat, rice, and kerosene to people living in India through Fair Price Shops (FPS) at affordable price. It helps to eradicate poverty and ensure nutrition to the economically backward population. PDS can leverage RFID for a number of advantages including addressing mismanagement, corruption, and pilferage.
RFID captures accurate and detailed information at each stage of the supply chain. RFID helps PDS supply chain in collating the information on time of harvest of grains, the duration it was stored in a warehouse, packaging and transportation details, real-time tracking of the packaged grains and also point of sale information. By combining GPS technologies, RFID can track and save all relevant information about the packed commodities in transit.
By storing information on key parameters such as moisture content, product quality, date of harvest, packaging, transportation mechanism etc., the RFID tag passes relevant information at each stage of the supply chain thus, enhancing efficiency and reducing food wastage. This helps the nation to improve the health of its population and saves them from diseases, especially the ones caused by undernourishment.
Power distribution system
Electric power distribution system is another area where there is a lot of pilferage and unwarranted intrusions that may come from electricity generation to consumption. An efficient RFID system enables tracking of the system, collecting usage details and saving from unwarranted losses and thefts. A few uses of RFID technology in electric power distribution are as below:
Toll collection systems
When a car enters the automated toll collection lane, a UHF RFID reader in the toll booth constantly emits a signal which reads the passive tag on the car windscreen that enter the read field. The RFID tag wakes in response and flashes its EPC ID to the Reader. This EPC ID is routed to the computer which matches it with the driver’s pre-stored information and deducts amount to his account appropriately. This not only saves time, it also enables both the vehicle owner and the administration of the toll to efficiently navigate and manage the toll respectively.
The way ahead
Digital is surely the way to go. The efforts we put towards Digital India initiatives are sure to reap rich dividends for us. We are at an opportune moment to ensure the use of RFID across all such initiatives helps India to enter the select group of advanced countries – forever shedding the tag of a developing country.
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